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is it a joke?
We are a tiny corporation with offices in the USA, in England, in Germany, in France and in Japan. Over the 40 fellows we count on, 18 are developers (8 for the WinTel environment all release included since Windows 3.x up to Vista 64, 2 on OS/2, 4 on Unix, 3 on OS X and 1 for DOS), 5 are for localisation (our solution is available in 19 different languages), 5 are for support (one per office), 5 are for marketing and sales (one per office) and the rest (7) are doing all the production (CD copies and packaging) and all the administrative stuff.

Due to the complexity of the code (written in pure C and assembly), I don?t see how we could cut our development lab (a real team working together for over 15 years) and ask to a community of ?purported? developers using Script, VBA or VC to help us to enhance our .features or, even worst our performances.

Then, since by design our solution does not require any 24x24 / 7x7 technical support, there is no way for us to make any revenue from that perspective.

As I said earlier, publishing our code will allow competitors to fill a huge gap to meet our functionality and performance, what they did try without any success these last 10 years.

Read that: I?m not against OSS! But in our case, this would kill our small corporation that was around for the last 30 years doing business in the war market of personal computer software against even our ?allies? such as IBM, CA, MS, Symantec and recently Google..

Now, the day I will retire (within 15 years), I will publish all the code we wrote.

Until then, except if a zealot of the OSS romance is able to show me with accurate data a real business model that allow me to pay my fellows every month Vs a pure symbolic ?bla bla bla?, I don?t see another way but to stay in a classical business environment that allows me to pay my bills (may be using some new distribution models within the software market such as the pay per use).

And I?m far to be a billionaire, even if we already sold over 4 millions licenses to over 500 of the fortune 1.000 worldwide companies.

I think that producing high IP solution for a commodity price is a better way to allow our corporation to grow and to reasonably pay all our fellows (employees) and in the same time to give confidence to our customers.

Breg
Posted by: BregS   Posted on: 01/16/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use
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I hope Arras makes it  nucrash | 01/15/07
It would be nice if they would move to Linux/PostgreSQL though. I would not  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Since it's open souce...  BregS | 01/15/07
Personally, I don't have a use for this softwre, but, someone might. Though  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
if you don't have use of it, why...  BregS | 01/16/07
I imagine there are better projects out there that will also run on Linux.  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
Open source is the superior model  Chad_z | 01/15/07
Just to understand your point,  BregS | 01/15/07
OSS is good in many markets  Boot_Agnostic | 01/15/07
Yes, customers will pay for open source, and they like the guarantees it  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Very few I have seen.  No_Ax_to_Grind | 01/15/07
So, how do you explain all of the revenue for RedHat, MySQL, SleepyCat, etc  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
But none of them  BregS | 01/15/07
RedHat and MySQL are making good money. RedHat in particular has been on a  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Same can be said for closed source companies  Richard Flude | 01/15/07
spoken like a true zealot  mdsmedia | 01/16/07
Sorry, not any developers I know.  No_Ax_to_Grind | 01/15/07
Obviously you are an unbiased sample representative of our population (nt)  CobraA1 | 01/15/07
There are a lot of very sustainable open source business models out there.  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
Please name a few models  oldsysprog | 01/16/07
It really does not matter how or where the money comes from to pay the  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
What are you afraid of No_Ax?  mdsmedia | 01/16/07
Got to be a good thing  Richard Flude | 01/15/07
Waht about low cost software?  BregS | 01/15/07
Not every case is the same. In your case, you might be able to keep part of  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
You defined open source...  Anton Philidor | 01/16/07
The average Linux programmer makes a lot more thant the average Windows  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
Unfortunately,  BregS | 01/16/07
You might be able to open source base functionality, but charge for  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
Is you software suitable?  Richard Flude | 01/15/07
Just tell me how to...  BregS | 01/15/07
Did you ever consider that if it was open source, you might be able to do  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
is it a joke?  BregS | 01/16/07
Business models? Which one?  BregS | 01/15/07
Have you ever heard of RedHat and MySQL??? They are both  DonnieBoy | 01/15/07
and what do they got?  BregS | 01/16/07
So are you denying that RedHat and MySQL make good money????  DonnieBoy | 01/16/07
without knowing your software...  mdsmedia | 01/16/07
Please be nice...  BregS | 01/16/07
The important points are in the last paragraphs.  Anton Philidor | 01/16/07
Unfortunately...  BregS | 01/16/07
Make a company to provide same service  Boot_Agnostic | 01/16/07
This is not only unethical...  BregS | 01/16/07

What do you think?

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